Patient Care

At UC San Francisco, we don’t just treat diseases, we treat individuals. We put our patients’ priorities at the center of our care, and strive for breakthrough discoveries so that we can improve people’s lives.

Research

UC San Francisco is leading revolutions in health – and those revolutions often start in the lab. From basic science to clinical research, we are constantly pushing scientific boundaries and earning worldwide recognition for our discoveries.

Education

At UC San Francisco, we encourage our students to approach health care issues with critical thinking and a spirit of inquiry. As tomorrow’s health and science leaders in training, UCSF students embody our passion for improving the human condition and pushing health care forward.

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Research Excellence 2

Culture of Collaboration

The key to UCSF’s research success is its trademark culture of collaboration. Scientists regularly reach across disciplines to gain insights and new strategies for understanding and treating disease – insights that would be elusive in laboratories focused only on a single research approach. Senior faculty scientists consider a collaborative spirit crucial in recruiting new colleagues, and many new faculty members cite this collaborative environment as the tipping point that led them to choose UCSF rather than other top-ranked research universities.

Researchers inspect Drosophila, more commonly known asfruit flies, under a microscope.

“For the last 35 years, strong research alliances and partnerships have been UCSF’s touchstone,” says Keith Yamamoto, PhD, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine. “The whole here is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Each of us knows that we do better science and we are better scientists because we are at UCSF.”

The priority on collaboration is reflected in numerous UCSF centers, institutes and departments that bring together basic scientists, clinical researchers and clinicians with diverse expertise to pursue problems using multidisciplinary strategy.

A partnership of the School of Pharmacy and School of Medicine, for example, has created the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. Experts in understanding how drugs act in the body and how our genetic makeup affects drug effectiveness are working with bioengineers and molecular engineers to develop new drug delivery strategies, such as an implantable pump.

In other cross-campus collaborations, a team of scientists from the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine recently assessed a series of studies that led to the determination that smoking increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that contradicts tobacco industry claims to the contrary. School of Dentistry researchers and stem cell scientists are studying the use of stem cells in regenerating dental tissues.

Innovative Partnerships

Development of the Mission Bay campus over the past few years has provided space for research programs to expand and to explore new partnership opportunities with industry and other academic institutions.

Helping drive industry partnerships is the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, known as QB3 and headquartered on the UCSF Mission Bay campus. QB3 was conceived to bring basic and clinical scientists at three UC campuses — San Francisco, Berkeley and Santa Cruz-- together with their counterparts in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.